WKRP in Cincinatti

[Michael]

My students were asking me for some American TV and it was tough to think of an honest show they could enjoy and use to practice their English. Ha-hah, finally found the old show online. BOOOGER!

[grzegorz]

Good choice.

Shows had much less slang back then.

Taxi would probably be good too...

Or even the Twilight Zone. I could see Chinese girls getting into that show, if they can get past it being in black and white.

[Interloper]

Grammar problems? Les Nesman will set them straight!

[meeks]

three's company

[Michael]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not crazy about Three's Company. I'm looking for true entertainment, not actual programming.

[grzegorz]

My high schoolers enjoyed Everybody Hates Chris.

I think it was something about the proud gossiping mother and hard working dad watching every penny.

It's always good to choose a few different shows. That way there's something for everybody.

In Europe my students loved South Park but I'd be afraid to show that stuff in China. Then again I think it would go over their heads, although I hear the show is big in Taiwan.

[grzegorz]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not crazy about Three's Company. I'm looking for true entertainment, not actual programming.

Don't worry someone has already taken care of that.

Just ask them who started the Korean war.

[Michael]

Totally! They don't need any more hidden messages clogging their subconscious.

[bailewen]

Season 1 of "The Simpsons" works pretty brilliantly. Later seasons tend to be too deeply stewed in pop culture references but the early stuff is very universal family stuff. If your working with University students, you could probably go as far as Season 3 or 4 before it stopped making sense.

Got a link for WKRP? I didn't find it on baidu and I'm always kind of starved for TV. (shamedly)

Incidentally,moviewise, "50 First Dates" is good as is "School of Rock" and pretty much anything from Pixar. The trick is finding DVD's with accurate English subtitles. Sometime's they're there as close captioning for the hearing impaired. I don't think there is a single better training format for improving listening comprehension than just watching movies or TV with subtitles in the same language as what is being spoken. That's how I got my Chinese listening comprehension up to speed incredibly fast. I spent a summer vacation just watching endless Chinese TV series. Chinese speech with Chinese subtitles. With DVD's your students can do the same thing with movies. English movies with English subtitles. It's absolutely 100% necessary to shut off the Chinese subtitles or they get nothing out of the exercise. TV is better than movies but it's almost impossible to find American TV with English subtitles. DVD's usually have close captioning.

[Michael]

Can you believe I get paid to teach a class on American movies? I love it! I agree with you about practicing listening comprehension and what I have done is to try and find movies that are honest and high quality so they are deep enough to be studied like a small book. I think 50 First Dates would be a good, light-hearted break from heavy studying, and also a way to just sit there and get some practice. I feel my students will gain the most from the time spent watching english language films by watching movies with as much depth as possible, but I do mix it up so they don't burn out. I'm going to do Groundhog Day after Spirited Away in a couple of weeks. I gave them a preview of Spirited Away and they didn't seem to mind that it was Japanese. Gods be praised!

The class has a book with a lot of heavy films like Cuckoo's Nest (last semester some loved it, this semester some hated it) and dishonest films like American Beauty, so I've been downloading additional stuff off t0rrentz and then spending all my time editing subtitle files, creating study guides that log each and every use of non-standard, slang, idiom, etc. and provide a one-line (usually) explanation so they can follow along while watching and understand everything they're hearing. The Sideways (2004) study guide was 8 pages long! Took like 20-30 hours to finish that sucker.

It's a Word .doc with simple tables:
00:02:13 a total nightmare a serious problem
00:02:13 I had a bunch of stuff I had to deal with there were many things I had to take care of
00:16:11 get laid have sex
synonym I’m going to help you score. I’m going to make sure you get a roll in the hay.
00:16:44 shrink psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist
00:17:21 get your bone smooched Help you to have oral sex with a woman. In this case, bone means penis. Smooch means to kiss.

The funniest question I had after giving the study guide to the students was, "Are these correct?" I'm like, I just gave you an 8 page guide with every single non-standard English usage that took me a week to finish, and you want to know if they're "correct". Turns out the student meant, are the idioms shown in the movie correct, which is even a bigger head-scratcher. If it's an honest movie, then in that context, yes, they are correct. Different student asked me the same question a few minutes later.

Sometimes students ask me about dirty words and how to curse, and I just give them Sideways with my study guide. I found that most of them miss major plot points and just don't activate their minds sufficiently if they don't know nearly all of what's being said. Entertainment is a second priority, and they have to work much harder than you or I to benefit from the time spent. I have found they can't focus their minds when in "english mode", so I'm just trying to support them with everything I can think of.

I also give them extensive questions indexed and ordered by running time so they can go back and really understand the film, plus a PPT with an overview of all characters and screenshots so they can remember who's who, which is going to be necessary next week when we do Godfather, Part I. I think I'm going to make an .avi with still shots and audio quotes like, "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse," so they can remember. Finally, I copy a few scenes from the subtitles and print them into scripts for them to act, with the main goal being to speak naturally, without concern for pronunciation problems, which I have found are impossible for them to fix. So many of them sound like machines when they speak English, but a few of those can quickly recognize a difference in tonal quality when doing a basic acting type class, which is what I'm going for when we act the scenes out. Outsiders (1983) was fun for acting.

For each film, I do a PPT overview, the students watch the movie outside of class, finish the PPT with more details, go over the study guide to clarify language, students discuss questions I give them in small groups, full group discussion of questions and theme, then acting. It takes 2-3 class periods for each film. It's tough finding crowd-pleasers that are honest, deep, and not full of cultural references. Slang and idioms are okay, but tons of references and bizarre grammar seems like a bad choice to me.

Outsourced (2006) has been the biggest hit. They were thumbs down on Pushing Hands (1992), but I thought they'd like the break after Cuckoo's Nest; I was wrong. They like Shawshank Redemption and Kramer vs. Kramer, but aren't crazy about American Graffiti even after requesting a film on "teenage American culture...and cars." How could I go wrong with Am. Graffiti? Guess I should have done Dazed and Confused.

I copied a bunch of films onto the class computer and asked them to review a few minutes of each to choose what they like, but they haven't done that. We vote each week on the next movie, but a lot of them just write "it's up to you" on their ballot. Here are some of the films I've suggested. Some of them are from their book and really aren't my choice:

American Beauty (1999) from the textbook, a very dishonest film, good for analysis
Casablanca (1942)
Children of Men (2006)
Christmas Story, A (1983)
Dead Poets Society (1989) from the textbook, bores me to tears
Defending Your Life (1991)
Dirty Dancing (1987) crowd pleaser with female main character
Graduate, The (1967) from the textbook, don't like it for teaching, but the scuba scene is hilarious
Groundhog Day (1993)
Godfather, The Part 1 (1972) simple theme, complicated plot, hoping the time that Coppola gives to each scene and dialog will help them to practice focusing while in "english mode"
Hours, The (2002) from the textbook, hate it, would probably refuse to teach this
Hustler, The (1961) would love to teach this, but doubt it will happen. A lot of them just don't want serious films.
Journey of Natty Gann (1985) most of the class are girls so wanted to give them some female main characters
Jungle Fever (1991) from the textbook, not sure how it would go over, but I'm not too interested in it
K-PAX (2001)
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
Last Detail, The (1973) this would be a Ph. D. course on listening skills
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) I taught this to my American culture class, but don't expect my "infotainment" group to choose it
Outsiders, The (1983) lukewarm reception, but very good discussion and acting, students were kind of wide-eyed during discussion when they realized its depth
Philadelphia (1993) from the textbook, bores me to tears
Scent of a Woman (1992) from the textbook, not too bad, but I think there are better choices
Sideways (2004) some students couldn't deal with a dialog film about two guys on a road trip, but some loved it
Spirited Away (2001) female main character and looking forward to exploring the subtext about the economic system when making the study material
Splendor in the Grass (1961) from the textbook, a terrible choice, the whole movie is one hidden symbol after another
Tex (1982) an easy film to understand, pretty much an Outsiders-lite
V for Vendetta (2005)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) because of all the NAZI symbolism in the film, if we do this one I can get into World War II and maybe get them interested in Patton. Ha-hah, just a pipe dream. I'd prefer Strangelove , both have George C. Scott, but not sure if they'd appreciate the humor. Damn, Strangelove's a funny movie, though.

Up until this week, I was editing the subtitles manually in a normal text editor for the past one and a half semesters, but just found a really good freeware for that task. Now it's almost fun! Time consuming, but a lot of fun. It's like I'm in film editing class; I have really started noticing new things that I never previously looked for.

And finally, the the WKRP link is in my sig.

[Bär]

What do you mean by dishonest in relation to American Beauty? (I'm ambivalent about that film and saw it just once, maybe twice.)

[Michael]

To the audience, a film or TV is essentially a fantasy. Any dream sequences or fantasies within the film may be described as such accurately, but for the effect that the film has on a person's subconscious mind, there is no difference between "fantasy" and "reality" on the silver screen or boob tube.

In American Beauty, the main character is a 44 y.o. magazine advertising salesman named Lester who has several sexual fantasies about his daughter's 16 y.o. best friend. While this is not so bad and it could happen to anyone, the movie is dishonest on this plot line because it pretends that the waking events in the movie are more significant to the audience than the fantasy events. Lester has at least two explicit fantasy sequences with the naked girl, whose body is obscured by red roses, and then finally a "real" sequence with the girl at the end of the film, where they show her topless. The final scene serves to symbolically "consumate" some of the pent-up desire from the previous fantasy sequences.

As I recall, Lester's most explicit sexual fantasy was of the girl, Angela, naked in a tub with red rose petals floating on the surface. Lester puts his hand into the water between her legs as the camera quickly changes angle, moving in closer and closer, which visually repeats the action of him putting his hand between her legs. For the subconscious mind of the viewer, this is just as real as any other part of the film, but because it's "just a fantasy", the viewer might not condemn it for the statutory rape that it is. You must remember that only the conscious mind has the capacity of morality. The subconscious mind accepts everything it perceives and can not process negative commands, such as "Take off her clothes, but don't have sex." It only processes the "take off her clothes" command.



At the end of the film, Lester has gotten the young, vulnerable girl on the sofa, onto her back, removed her pants, and the camera has repeatedly shown him moving his hand up her bare leg, caressing her leg repeatedly, and then removed her shirt, revealing her breasts. In the subconscious mind of the viewer, it's like the sex has already happened because now the "reality" of her actually half-naked body mixes with the previous fantasies of her fully naked on the bed, and in the bath with Lester's hand between her legs. However, Lester doesn't actually consumate the act, and along with emotionally manipulative music plus heartfelt hugging, he sort of comes off like a good guy who was considerate of the fact she was was a virgin. Also, he doesn't actually touch her breasts, which would be the threshold in most jurisdictions for statutory rape or sexual assault of a minor. If the makers of the film were actually concerned with the purpose of such laws, protecting the youth from sexual predators, they wouldn't have needed to be so explicit or used non-linear camera techniques during the sexual fantasies.

So what the film does is give a message on the conscious level that Lester did not finally give in to his sexual urges, but on the subconscious level, the film repeatedly shows him acting on those urges. The dishonesty is that the apparent message on the conscious level, and the real message on the subconscious level of the film are not only opposing, but obviously crafted to be so.

This is just one of the dishonest aspects of American Beauty. The vast majority of TV and film fall into this category and are definitely not simply entertainment, but are purposeful programming of the subconscious mind.

Mike

[Interloper]

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not crazy about Three's Company. I'm looking for true entertainment, not actual programming.

Just two words: "Barney Miller."

[Interloper]

So what the film does is give a message on the conscious level that Lester did not finally give in to his sexual urges, but on the subconscious level, the film repeatedly shows him acting on those urges. The dishonesty is that the apparent message on the conscious level, and the real message on the subconscious level of the film are not only opposing, but obviously crafted to be so.

This is just one of the dishonest aspects of American Beauty. The vast majority of TV and film fall into this category and are definitely not simply entertainment, but are purposeful programming of the subconscious mind.

That was a very interesting interpretation of the movie, Mike. Thanks for the well thought-out insights. I'm wondering, though whether the movie was trying more to show that how we act in reality ultimately is more important than what we are dealing with subconsciously? Kind of a morality play on how we control our impulses externally, and as far as most of society is concerned -- especially those who would be the victims -- that's enough?

[shawnsegler]

I've been re-watching "Soap". It's amazing. Ridiculously funny. Kind of the Arrested Development of it's day.